Most web hosting accounts will come with basic monitoring services that allow you to determine if your website is online or not.  One advantage of managed hosting solutions is the fact that you will have access to a greater number of monitoring services that not only monitor your website’s availability but some of the critical services required to keep your webpage online that basic monitoring services may not detect.  Here are some of the different monitoring services web hosting providers utilize.

Ping monitoring is the standard basic monitoring system that is included in a large majority of hosting accounts, whether they are managed or not.  An automated service from the hosting company will ping your hosting account, virtual private server or dedicated server expecting a timely response.  If the ping is left unanswered, your account will be flagged for investigation or a warning message will be sent out to the appropriate parties.  Port monitoring operates much in the same fashion but instead looks for responses for specific ports on your hosting account.

Service monitoring is used to ensure essential services are running as expected.  This style of monitor will check to make sure things such as your MySQL databases, mail servers, Apache and ftp servers are online.  If it detects any issues it will trigger a warning message to the technical support team.

The physical components in your physical server can also be monitored.  The health and temperature of such items as your CPU and disk drive can be remotely measured and analyzed to ensure there aren’t any issues.  Monitors can also be set to signal when you are running out of room on your hard drive or if the server load becomes too high.

The more monitoring services you get with your managed hosting account, the better.  These redundant monitoring systems will trigger action from the technical support team should something not be working correctly on your web hosting account.